IBM's all-star saleman (cont.)

Gupta, however, was after billions, not millions. He was right in the middle of the fastest-growing cellphone market in the world. Small, inexperienced startups were battling for market share, and speed was everything. Spending months or years hammering out back-office systems could spell the difference between dominating the industry and being an also-ran. What if the wireless telcos could free up money and brainpower to focus on strategy, branding, and marketing, while IBM attended to the corporate innards?

Gupta had the perfect prospect. He had first met Bharti Airtel founder Sunil Mittal (unrelated to steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal) a dozen years earlier. "I remember sitting across from Mr. Mittal at the table negotiating for a batch of just 20 air-cell towers. Now they buy thousands and thousands," he says. In 2003, Gupta and his boss, Ramesh Awtaney, approached Mittal, whose company was a relative newcomer to the wireless business, with a novel idea: IBM would build the bulk of the company's back-office operations in exchange for a cut of the profits. The 10-year deal was expected to be worth $750 million, but five years in, it has grown to $1 billion. It is now used as a case study in IBM's emerging-markets training.

Mittal's endorsement gave IBM the perfect calling card to approach the dominant player in the market - the company that would eventually become Vodafone. Again, Gupta started small. He persuaded them to let IBM provide their employees laptops in 2003. Within a year Gupta had bagged his first order for IBM servers. All the while, he knew the execs were keeping an eye on Bharti Airtel, whose growth had started to explode. He began planting the seeds: What if they could, like their competitor, spend all their time worrying about strategy rather than trying to build the best data-entry system? Gupta knew that it was key not to push too hard. During one early meeting with the Vodafone team, he could see that the prospects were losing interest. Gupta's sales team responded by cornering their prey by the buffet, drinks in hand, and pitching them even harder. Noticing the twitch in the general manager's brow and his glazed eyes, Gupta made a quick move. "I rounded up my guys in the other room and said, 'Look, this customer is not prepared for marriage, he is prepared for courtship, so let's spend some time on courtship,'" he remembers. Observes Vodafone CTO Naresh Gupta (no relation) of his negotiating partner: "He looks very polite. He tends to agree with whatever the customer asks. But then he gives what he has to give. That's the trick. It will not appear to the customer that he has not given," he chuckles.

Four years after his initial sales call, in December 2007, Gupta sold Vodafone - the same crew who vowed never to do business with IBM - on a five-year $600 million contract to handle everything from customer service to finances.

The Gupta family lives in an apartment complex called Beverly Park in Gurgaon, a newly built suburb just outside Delhi. Their 3,100-square-foot ground-floor apartment has boxy modernist furniture and a sculptured backyard where Gupta often brings clients and colleagues to cap the evening with a whiskey. The complex has security, a pool, tennis courts, and parking for his black Toyota Camry, which Gupta's driver washes by hand nearly every day. On Sunday afternoons, when Gupta's time is finally his own, he walks across the parking lot, hand-in-hand with his wife, to shop. His two children, 15 and 8, attend private schools nearby. (Gupta's IBM forebears would approve. As 25-year sales veteran William Simmons wrote of his training at IBM in the 1940s: "To live in a less desirable suburb or part of the city was thought to reflect poorly on IBM.") Gupta won't disclose his salary but says his apartment cost $200,000 three years ago, and today he thinks it's worth $500,000. His wife, Davinder Kaur, is happy to have a permanent home: She and their two children moved between Bangalore, Jaipur, and Delhi seven times in seven years when he got his first big job in telecom.

Economically it's a big step up from his own childhood in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh, where Gupta was the youngest of five kids and the coddled only son. His father, a mathematician who worked for the government, was already saddled with the dowries for four daughters but scraped together tuition for Gupta to attend a local engineering college. At 23, Gupta took a sales job at a regional telecom company that sold walkie-talkies. "Back then I didn't ask clients for their phone numbers," he said. "I asked if they had a phone." While his peers were selling 20-unit batches of walkie-talkies, Gupta jumped on the fact that the Indian government was soliciting bids for private companies to provide walkie-talkie systems for truckers. Businesses were invited to submit proposals to run the systems in each of the hundreds of cities in India. "What do you do," Gupta inquired, "if you want to do business in more than one city?" The government's response: You turn in more than one proposal. So Gupta created a production room in his office building and hauled in 70 photocopiers. He persuaded his colleagues to help him run off more than 25,000 pages of documents. "We submitted close to 100 trunks in a big truck," he says. He ended up winning the business for every single city in India.

Gupta, in other words, knows how to work a bureaucracy, which probably has something to do with his success at IBM. "IBM has a far more complex matrix, compared with other organizations," says Gupta's boss, Awtaney, matter-of-factly. "To know who are the people who need to say yea and how would you navigate this in the system is very difficult." In India, IBM has added 65,000 people - or grown 800% - since Gupta joined. To understand how the place worked and what his colleagues could offer his clients, he launched a vast investigative effort into his own company. He paid courtesy calls on new colleagues in the research labs to see what they were up to. He enlisted engineers in brainstorming sessions to see what they thought Vodafone or Bharti Airtel could use. He got plenty of coaching from IBM's professional education team, with courses like "Basic Blue" (how to get things done) and "Mega Sales" (how to negotiate the really big deals). Early on, he was picked for this elite program, which combined a week each at business schools in Singapore and China, 18 months of online coursework, and regular meetings with a mentor to guide him in negotiating complex deals. Next year Gupta will be among only a few dozen IBMers to take "Bright Blue," a course specifically designed for leaders in emerging markets.

Of course at IBM, even superstars have quotas. Gupta won't divulge what his are, but says that they're pegged to analyst estimates of industry growth, and he adds that he exceeds them with such regularity that he barely checks how he's doing anymore. Last May, as a reward for being a perennial member of IBM's quota-topping 100% club and among the 1% of IBM's sales force who bring in the most new business, the company flew Gupta and his wife to Bermuda for a week of fancy dinners, spa treatments, and speeches by the likes of Michael Douglas.

If, between the Singaporean business school, the Chinese business school, and audiences with Michael Douglas, it seems that IBM is prepping Gupta for a more global role, that's the idea. His boss Awtaney recently moved to Singapore to handle telecom sales throughout Asia and the South Pacific. Gupta could follow a similar vertical path, or he could move within the company to another industry. The best way to do this, he knows, is to spot an opportunity in a fast-growing market where IBM doesn't compete yet. In Gupta's living room, as we munch on chicken with marinated curd that Davinder has made, the lights flicker and dim, and then the fan's hum goes momentarily silent. This has happened on the half-hour all evening, yet no one stops talking when the room goes dark. It's unnerving. Finally I ask, "What's with the electricity?"

The generator has kicked on now, and the whir of the fan starts up again, the lights brightening. "Power," says Gupta. His eyes narrow. So much is wasted! Stolen! Mismanaged! He's visited IBM's research lab, where the company has developed a technology that lets power companies monitor the flow of power - where it's coming from and where it's leaking - in order to maximize it. He knows the power can't be this bad forever in half-million-dollar homes. People will demand that it improve. Could he do for energy what he's done for wireless connectivity? Could he get in on the ground floor and help build out this industry? "I might," he says, pondering the idea. After all, "It's all sales." 

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